Last days, in Oristano, to visit "Kolossòi. Pastorello nell'Isola dei Giganti". The exhibition was inaugurated on October 19th at the Foro Boario and will close tomorrow with free admission and with the participation of the artist himself, Giovanni Manunta, aka Pastorello.
This is the largest exhibition dedicated to the artist from Sassari, curated by Ivo Serafino Fenu on the occasion of the twenty-sixth Dromos festival. It is promoted by the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Oristano in collaboration with the Oristano Foundation and the Mont'e Prama Foundation. Pastorello, born in 1967, is among the most representative protagonists of the Sardinian artistic scene and beyond.
Over sixty works are exhibited at the Foro Boario, some unpublished and from the collections of Giuseppe Demara, Nicola Cocco, and Roberto Pisano. The works pay homage to the monumental statues discovered by the archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu at the Mont'e Prama site, delving into the etymology of the term "kolossòi".
Not only that, the works offer a metaphysical and metahistorical perspective on an island inhabited by giants, wild creatures, primordial trees and pre- and post-human landscapes. Worlds in continuous transformation, populated by seductive and at the same time disturbing figures, which are configured as a real "visual trap", the result of an artist who has made painting the beating heart of his existence.
A pure painter, in his pre-Adamite and psychedelic landscapes he does not convey messages that are not inherent to the pictorial practice itself, hence their semantic ambiguity, their self-referentiality and their being alien and falsely hospitable", observes Fenu in the 96-page catalogue of the exhibition offered free of charge to visitors tomorrow. Among the works on display, a large installation, created in collaboration with the ceramist Salvatore Farci and Studio K&P (Giovanni Manunta, Gabriele Moretti, Salvatore Piroddi and Giuseppe Tavera), which reveals the hidden meaning of the title, "Kolossòi".
"This exhibition is much more than a simple collection of works: it is a journey through a dimension suspended between myth, history and imagination", underlines in the same pages of the catalogue the Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Oristano Luca Faedda, who strongly wanted this exhibition to reaffirm the Foro Boario as a point of reference for contemporary art not only for the city but for all of Sardinia. "Kolossòi evokes a powerful and almost dreamlike, metahistorical and metaphysical imagery: an encounter between the contemporary and Sardinian mythology, between giants, creatures and ancient myths that emerge as bridges between modern art and the historical roots of the Island", adds Sebastiano Corona, one of the organisers of the Dromos festival.